


The Scottish Barman

by lokilickedme



Series: Chemical Prehistories [3]
Category: Ewan McGregor - Fandom, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Adult Themes, Brief Mention of Violence, Ewan's POV, F/M, Friendship, Fuckboy speaks, Minor Drug Use, Romance, True Love, brief mention of abusive childhood, brief mention of bisexuality, brief mention of death, rough language, un-politically correct reference to ethnicity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:05:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6151607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokilickedme/pseuds/lokilickedme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ewan gets his turn to speak.  Another in the series of Chemical prehistories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Scottish Barman

 

 

My name's Ewan, I'm from the proud-with-no-real-reason-to-be clan of McDonough, the biggest familial cluster of obnoxious assholes you'd ever hope to run across in a drunken brawl out back of just about anywhere.  But you can call me Fuckboy, everybody else around here does.  And I answer to it, so there you have it.

I'm the barman at Tommy's.  If you're familiar with downtown San Diego, you know Tommy's.  It's that place nearly as far west as you can go without falling into the ocean, the last good booze joint on the outskirts before the beaches start.  There's an article from the New York Times on the wall in the office that declares us to be a five-star establishment, I know it's there because every time the boss takes it down and puts it in the desk, I take it back out and hang it back up.  I tried hanging it out in the public area so people could see it, I mean what's the point of having five stars if you don't tell anybody?  But he about took my head off with it, so now I don't fuck with it.  He's a humble guy, our Tommy. _The_ Tommy, the guy whose name is on the outside of the building.

I first met him when I was a wee bugger but from day one he treated me like I mattered, even though I was this dipshit little kid from the other side of the boardwalk.  And even though he looked like some rockstar god who just walked offstage after a sold out show where every female in the audience flashed her tits at him during the encore, he was still a nice guy and let me tag along with him and his buddy Chris, who was every bit as fucking godlike.  Thor and goddamn Loki, marching out of Valhalla after taking the place over and deciding it was too boring for them.  And there I was, thirteen years old, voice still cracking like eggs dropped off a high rise, clumsy and stupid but determined to be cool and just about pissing myself when these two perfect specimens of alpha maleness took me under their collective wing.

Well, they tolerated me anyway, probably because I was willing to run errands and fetch shit from sunup to sundown just to get to hang around the motorcycle shop they worked at.  Motorcycles are my thing, always have been since I was old enough to grab stuff off the Hot Wheels display every time mum pushed me past it in the shopping cart at Wal-Mart.  I always grabbed the motorcycles.  Unfortunately it's a habit that followed me into adolescence, which is why I work at Tommy's...he's the only guy in town who would give me a job with my history and rap sheet and proclivity toward taking things that didn't belong to me.

Thanks to Tommy and his generous soul, I've been driving a Harley Fatboy for the last four years and have upgraded twice to newer models without having to steal a single one of them.  Best fucking boss in the world.

 

Tommy married this little girl named Anja not long ago.  Sweet little thing, cute as hell, I'm not into redheads but he claims he wasn't either until she walked in and gave him a boner that still hasn't gone down. It's been almost ten years, I'm thinking that must be getting a little uncomfortable by now.  They're about halfway to their first baby and every time she waddles in and he looks up from drying glasses and that look comes over his face, all I can think of is the first time I met him.  The reason being that I'm fairly certain that was the same look I had.

Don't judge me, I like girls.  But sometimes I like guys too, and Tommy was my first guy crush.  I think it was an at-first-sight thing, because I've never forgotten the way I felt when he turned around and smiled at me with those huge bright blue eyes and that killer grin, and all that fucking long black hair.  Rock star, man.  A fucking wet dream no matter what side of the gender bias you lay on.  When I found out later that he had Cree blood it just made him that much cooler, because it helped explain the very first thing I ever saw him do.

We were standing around out back of some girl's house - she'd just split with her abusive asshole boyfriend and was afraid to go back to get her stuff, and her brother had come into the shop looking for anyone who knew how to break into houses.  Tommy volunteered straight off the bat, and of course Chris stood up immediately, because where Tommy went so did Chris.  Thor and fucking Loki, man.  Minus the weird ass horsefucking shit, although Tommy's always been pretty openminded so who knows.

I went along, because that was just what I did.

And while our little group of heroes was standing around trying to figure out the best way to do this, Tommy headed straight for the back wall of the house and started climbing it.  I'm talking straight up, scaling it like fucking Spiderman till he got to the upstairs window and disappeared inside.  It took like seven seconds, half the guys didn't even believe it happened because he was gone before they even turned around to see where he'd went.  Next thing we know he's unlocked the back door from the inside and is tossing this chick's stuff out to us.

That was how he was - just a quiet cool, and you had to look fast to catch him doing something because there was no show to him, just do.  It was impressive as hell and he got a reputation real quick as being something of a wraith, like maybe he didn't really exist, or there was something to him that you didn't want to know about because it was just a bit too creepy and you were better off not knowing.  Sometimes when he turned around to look at you and that long midnight black hair covered half his face, it was easy to believe he wasn't entirely human.  He had the whole otherworldly thing going on, and nobody questioned it.  It was just Tommy.

When it got around that he had tribal blood, it just made his whole legend status that much more spooky.

We all knew he'd had a bad childhood, that a bullshit twist of fate sent him from a loving home into a nightmare that no kid had any right to survive.  But he did it, and came out the other side a god.  He wasn't anyone you wanted to mess with...on the other side of that angelic smile was the devil's smirk and it could change from one to the other before you could blink twice.  We never call the cops at the pub when there's an altercation, there's no need.  Usually Tommy can just step up to whoever's being an asshole and scare the shit out of them with that weird dominating-your-space thing he does, and all the piss and vinegar usually goes right out of them.  The ones that try to stand up to him always end up outside on their ass or on their face, depending on how much mouth they give him before his temper kicks in.  He's always been like that for as long as I've known him - all quiet cool until you push him too far, and then he unleashes the damn wolves on you.  He keeps them penned up inside, docile and content, but when it's time he just opens the gate and here they come, snarling and snapping and starving for blood.  It's amazing how many wolves he keeps in there.  Amazing and terrifying.  Ask the guys who've mouthed off at him enough to get his boot in their ribs, they'll tell you.  You don't mess with Tommy's fucking wolves.  And you don't mess with his friends, and you sure as hell don't mess with his woman.

Anja wasn't even his woman yet when he nearly killed this arrogant fucker named Eric for thinking he could take a swing on her.  There was bad blood between Tommy and Eric, historical shit that got whispered around but that nobody really knew the details to...they'd never liked each other and never made any bones about hiding it from anybody who cared to notice.  I knew from the look in his eyes as he watched them walk out together that he knew something we didn't.  He had a sense for when shit was about to go down, and nothing in his place ever snuck past his notice.  A few seconds later he took off out the door and before it even swung shut behind him we could hear the trashcans in the side alley crashing as Eric deadweighted into them, probably head first.

Nobody went out.  I don't know if anybody intended to, but if they did, Chris stationing his big self at the door changed their minds enough that not a soul even tried to get out of their chairs.  That stupid motherfucker Eric was on his own.

About a week later Tommy and Anja were a thing.  An official thing, which was really cool because he'd had heart eyes for her for going on close to a decade and it was just a sad thing to watch, even though he faked his way through it pretty well, acting like she was the last chick on earth he'd ever be interested in.  But there's no hiding that little light a person gets in their eyes when their soulmate walks in.  He had it, and it was on fucking highbeam.

He bought the pub when he was 21 and she was one of the first people to come in - unfortunately on the arm of one of his buddies, the nicest damn guy you'd ever want to meet.  Sam was one of those too-good-for-this-world kinda dudes, the sort you just wanted to hate because everything was right about him.  But you couldn't, because there was literally nothing to hate.  Other than the fact that he had Anja, but that was between him and Tommy and like I said, Tommy just put on this show of indifference when it came to her.  Nobody had to look twice to know his heart was thumping out of his chest when she was around, you just had to know what angle to look at him from.  But he thought he was doing a good job of hiding it, and we let him believe that.

For years those two sniped and bitched at each other like they were in third grade.  She was the cute little girl in pigtails and white knee socks and he was the little asshole boy who got off on yanking her braids and kicking dirt on her shiny shoes.  But she never cried or tattled to the teacher, she just held her own and sent him packing every time he came at her with his misguided declarations of love.  Every time he made fun of her hair me and Chris would roll our eyes, and every time she smiled sweetly and told him to fuck off, we added a few more people to the catering list for the wedding.  It took them eight damn years to get their act together, and yeah she was with Sam for six of those years, but we all knew it was just a very slow foreplay session.  When the time came, those two were going to bang like banshees.

Two years after Sam died, they did just that.  And we all hated to see Sam go, especially the way he did, but sometimes the universe just knows what it's doing.  I'm not saying the cosmos offed our buddy, but I'm willing to go out on a metaphysical limb here and theorize that fate did start pushing Tommy toward Anja all those years before they could do anything about it because it knew they were going to need each other.

Tommy ended up with a half grown kid he never knew he had, and Anja nearly died from a brain infection that left her a little bit jacked up.  Without each other, I doubt either of them would have made it through either event.  There's something healing in the hand of your one true love when it's wrapped around yours, and through both of those dramas, you never saw them when they weren't clinging to each other in some way.  Picture your OTP, people.  These two are it.

 

I guess the most information I ever got out of him has always come out in the back alley while we're sharing a joint.  He never seems to get high, probably because he pukes every time he starts to smoke, but he does get a little more free with his speech and willingness to answer questions.  And I'm full of questions.  I've been beat up more times than I've had cold beers for asking too many questions, mostly by him. I asked him once if he believes in true love, and he looked up at the sky with those from-somewhere-else eyes and nodded, real slow, exhaling a tendril of smoke that swirled around his face like Lucifer poking his head out of Hades to see what's going down in the cool world.

"True love is a construct," he finally said, his eyes still locked onto something that I couldn't see and probably wouldn't have understood if I did.  "There's no empirical evidence that it exists.  The only reason poets write about it is because we feel something in our hearts that our minds can't comprehend.  We put a name on it to make ourselves feel better, like we've got it all figured out."  He looked down for a second, dragging another long lungful before he leaned over and puked all over the pavement.  I laughed at him like I always do.  Dude might be a god, but he can't handle his weed.

When he stood up again and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, his eyes went back up to the sky again and right back to that same spot he'd been staring at before, the one I couldn't see.  "But yeah, I believe in it," he finally said, glancing through the open door into the back room of the pub where Anja was sleeping on the office sofa.  His face went all soft and Lucifer left...now there was just this dark angel, fooling everyone into thinking he was a god.  And we were willing to believe it, because there's a shortage of benevolent gods these days - and as deities go, Tommy's a pretty good one.

 

 

 


End file.
